Archive for the ‘Britain’ Category
People’s Assembly and Left Unity.
Real Left Unity.
Marxist Dentists around the UK leave copies of The Lady and Country Life to stir up class hatred.
At least that was my theory on reading Rachel Johnson’s magazine this morning waiting for an appointment.
One article about a Lady of the British Empire who could not boil an egg, had crossed the planet, swum with dolphins, holidayed in the Savanna, struck me.
I doubt if she was prepared to walk to Liddle to get 15 pence off a tin of sardines.
This, I suspect, is not a lone reaction.
Margaret Thatcher’s death and the rise of UKIP brought back a cold draft of class politics to this country.
Many realised that the Thatcher project, to make everybody stand or fall in the gales of competing on the market, and the pumped-up loathing of foreigners |(notably excepting the USA) that went with it, is alive and well.
Like many on the left, trade unionists and anti-cuts activists, I am committed to the People’s Assembly Against Austerity.
This is a grand occasion for us to get together on issues that affect us all, to build a constructive left-wing alternative to the politics of hate and the priorities of the wealthy.
It will unite us with our fellows across Europe in opposing the financial forces that have imposed cuts and more privatisation in the UK, and destitution and mass unemployment in countries from Greece and Spain to Portugal – not to mention the misery brought upon UKIP’s bogies in Rumania and Bulgaria.
There is a serious debate to be had about the European Union, and the role of the ”Troika’ in pushing through austerity.
The French left is divided between those who think that Angela Merkel is at heart a pragmatist and will – eventually – see sense and launch an expansionist drive. French president Hollande’s intervention yesterday, in which he proposed a European economic “governance” went in this sense. Some on his side believe in federalism, a politically united Europe.
Others are sceptical. They want a radical overhall of the EU. A few want greater national sovereignty restored.
In the UK we have by contrast, as Seamus Milne noted in the Guardian this week, a debate on Europe whose agenda is set by the right.
This is a threat,
a successful Tory-led campaign to pull out of the EU would risk unleashing a carnival of reaction, anti-migrant hysteria, more attacks on social rights, and a further lurch to the right.
Milne states, rightly,
What has been almost entirely missing from the mainstream British public debate has been the progressive case for fundamental change that has been central to the struggle over the EU and its treaties in mainland Europe. In the 1975 referendum, the left case against the then common market was that it was a cold war customs union against the developing world that would block socialist reforms. But the modern EU has gone much further, giving a failed neoliberal model of capitalism the force of treaty, entrenching deregulation and privatisation and enforcing corporate power over employment rights.
He concludes,
What would be fatal would be to allow the nationalist right to continue to dictate the EU agenda and wrap itself in the mantle of democratic legitimacy. The terms of debate have to change – for the sake of both Britain and Europe.
Much of the British left remain dominated by the anti-EEC ideas of the 1970s.
They have not confronted this menace.
Indeed they think their tiny forces can intervene to make the “progressive” case for a sovereign UK outside the EU.
We need a real campaign in place of this: for a united social Europe!
The People’s Assembly could be a place to make the case of this.
Left Unity.
Some of the left think there is a mileage in the Left Unity appeal of Kate Hudson and Ken Loach.
Recent prominent members of Respect , who failed to protest against George Galloway’ s politics, they are not in a position to preach unity to anybody least of all the ‘left’.
I merely cite this report by Tina Becker from the Weekly Worker to show that this is a dead-end,
Kate Hudson and Andrew Burgin (important driving forces) would have liked the proceedings to have gone differently. After all, the Stop the War Coalition and Respect – organisations both comrades were prominent in – were far more choreographed. But, ironically, bureaucratic coherence in fronts like these was provided by the likes of the Socialist Workers Party, part of the organised left to which LU is to a great extent a reaction. The politically decrepit Socialist Resistance – the one ‘insider’ group – is no substitute.
The proposed political platform written by Kate Hudson was circulated three days before; a proposal for the electoral procedure to the national coordination committee was sent out 20 hours before; the chairs seem to have been pre-chosen on the basis that they had no previous experience of handling big meetings (one chair was actually introduced as someone who had “never attended a political meeting before”). No wonder that quite a few times people in the room (the chairs included) did not actually know what exactly they were voting on. It was pretty chaotic, in other words.
This was also reflected in the rather uneven attendance. Local groups were supposed to send two delegates each, but where more people expressed an interest in coming, they were advised by the interim leadership to simply divide their group into smaller parts. For example, Manchester comrades – all sitting together in the same meeting, in the same room – selected five delegates from different parts of the city. Elsewhere, groups had not even met yet. Andrew Burgin admitted that about half of the “90 or 100” local groups exist only in so far as one person had volunteered to be the local contact. So the reality was that pretty much anybody who wanted to come could do so.
Unless, of course, you happened to be a representative of a political organisation. The interim organising committee had decided to bar existing groups from even sending observers – apart from a representative of the Red-Green Alliance from Denmark, who showed up halfway through the meeting. Obviously it would have been a little harsh to send this poor comrade packing after he had made such a long journey, presumably on a well-informed hunch.
Followed by the latest TUSC (Left involving the RMT, Socialist Party and SWP) election result.
Election of a Borough Councillor for Rawmarsh Ward (Rotherham) on Thursday 16 May 2013
| Baldwin, William George | British National Party | 80 |
| Gray, Andrew Tony | Trade Unionists and Socialists Against Cuts | 61 |
| Meharban, Mohammed | Liberal Democrats | 28 |
| Parker, Martyn Lawton | The Conservative Party Candidate | 107 |
| Vines, Caven | UK Independence Party | 1143 Elected |
| Wright, Lisa Marie | Labour Party Candidate | 1039 |
UKIP: UK Now Has Real Far-Right Populist Politics.
French Left’s Dilemma After Front National Breakthrough in 1984.
Like Cabu’s Grand Duduche you start by feeling that you don’t want to have anything to do with anybody who voted UKIP.
This came to me when the BBC’s Look East showed a chippie in Great Yarmouth. That town elected UKIP Councillors to Norfolk County Council. The chip-shop owner was vociferous in his UKIP support, as were many others in the seaside resort.
I like Yarmouth chips. They sell them with a choice of sauces. Inspired by Belgium custom you can get mayonnaise and curry, amongst other flavours.
I will make a point of not going to Yarmouth for my annual day-trip.
The party now has 15 councillors in Norfolk and scored 23.47% of the county vote - Conservative 32.6pc, Labour 22.75pc, Liberal Democrat 10.97pc, Green 6.55pc, Independent 3.27pc, Christian People’s Alliance 0.13pc, United People’s Party 0.02p
They got a councillor in Ipswich too, in Whitehouse and Whitton.
I will not feel comfortable in the company of anybody who backed James Crossley, or those , 20% of the electorate across town (and they didn’t stand in 2 divisions) who voted for them in Ipswich.
But that’s a reaction, not a strategy.
A Strategy?
We need clarity on how to deal with UKIP.
For a long time people on the left have been convinced that the threat from the far-right came from the BNP and the English Defence League.
Principally that there was a “massive surge” in hostility towards Muslims.
This view was reinforced by a whole industry of speculation about the Islamic ‘Other’.
This was always a skewed analysis: there is a little evidence that the masses were ready to engage in a wholesale attack on Muslims.
‘Islamophobia’ was also used by those who took this line to denigrate those who backed the secularists, feminists and trade unionists who, after the Arab Spring, have had to face right-wing Islamist governments.
Now we have a party that has focused on an ‘Other’ that is lot closer to home: the Eastern European hordes from Bulgaria and Romania.
Standing in, of course, for the ‘foreigners‘ already here.
In place of abstract ruminations about the Other, we had better look at an older anti-racist idea: scapegoating.
This is not a vote of the ignored’ working class’s expressing their real needs.
It is the result of a conscious attempt to deflect people’s anger at austerity, stagnating wages, and mounting personal debt, onto an easy target.
Foreigners, we know, are not the only thing UKIP are about.
They want to make life easier for British capitalists, they attack trade unions and the poor, and their cultural views are a mix of Norman Tebbit, Jeremy Clarkson and the US Tea Party.
They are dyed-in-the-wool free-marketeers.
UKIP councillors will no doubt often make fools of themselves.
But we cannot count on their ability to self-destruct.
We, the left, need to attack them where they are weak: are they for austerity or are they against it?
What will they do to help working people defend their rights?
Will they support the Living Wage?
Will the fight against tax breaks for companies and the rich?
Will they back the NHS?
Internationalism.
Before anything else the Left should shout, loudly, its internationalism!
Against hatred between the peoples!
For European unity of the peoples, the workers and the poor!
For a European Social Republic: level wages and benefits upwards!
Down with the Xenophobes!
Down with UKIP!
UKIP Campaign in Ipswich on Hatred of Foreigners.
Cat Herdsman.
“Massive Threat to Our Local Services.
No it’s not the cuts, austerity, or the recession.
UKIP leaflets distributed in Ipswich over the weekend begin by stating,
Within a year, 29 million Romanians and Bulgarians will gain the right to live, work and draw benefits here.
Only UKIP is taking seriously his massive threat to out local housing, schools, health and council services.
Ipswich Spy downplays UKIP’s potential here.
Certainly after reading press reports over the weekend we come away with the – justified – view that a bigger gaggle of cranks, nutters, racists and venomous right-wing extremists would be hard to find.
The Spy points out that,
Locally UKIP don’t have a branch in Ipswich. They have branches all over the Eastern Region, but none in Ipswich. The UKIP agent is from the Bury St Edmunds branch, although he was the UKIP candidate here in Ipswich at the last General Election and he lives in Stowmarket. So they don’t have the huge numbers of activists the Liberal Democrats could boast before they came into Government.
One could add that their candidate, Mark Tinney (for St Helen’s) has a shaky grasp on what local councils do.
His main policy plank is to “try to reduce parking charges and extended free parking in the town centre”.
These are County Council elections.
Parking is the responsibility of the Borough Council.
His other ideas are more police visibility and encouraging ”more business for Ipswich”.
We suspect that nobody will read this part of the leaflet.
They will alight on the ‘threat’ of hordes of Bulgarians and Romanians descending on Ipswich.
We consider, based on what Ipswich people say, that they will have more of an echo than Ipswich Spy thinks.
Informed people may well ‘ridicule” UKIP’s claims.
But the Tories and the right-wing media have relentlessly pursued the line that migrant workers are a ‘menace’.
They have continually attacked ‘Europe’, the EU’s social policies, the ‘regulation’, the ‘bureaucracy’ and the ‘waste’.
It’s no good bleating about what a bunch of odd-balls UKIP are.
They have feathered the UKIP nest.
Much of the Left too has failed to stand up for Europe.
Sections of the organised left have attacked the EU to such a point that they fail to distinguish between the free-market policies of the present Commission (backed by all the major states, and only feebly challenged by the French left government), and the potential of a Continent-wide union of the peoples.
If they want to get rid of the European Union what would they replace it with?
Many on the left go very quiet at this point.
Do they seriously think an “Independent” Socialist Britain or an “independent” Socialist Scotland would come about from leaving the EU?
To challenge the hatred and division spread by UKIP and the Tories, we need the politics of internationalism.
Unity between the peoples, between the working classes and the poor, across Europe.
For this we stand for a European Social Republic!
Before Thatcher: the Movement for Workers’ Control.
The 1970s and the Movement for Workers’ Control.
“Trade unions have historically bargained for better terms for the sale of labour power; they have not been able to challenge the existence of the labour market itself. Today, however, the relation between ‘political’ and ‘economic’ struggle have changed.”
Perry Anderson. The Limits and Possibilities of in: The Incompatibles. Trade Union Militancy and the Consensus. 1967.
Perry Anderson was writing about incomes policies. Attempts to impose, or reach by union consent, agreements about pay levels would be made by successive governments, Conservative or Labour, right until Margaret Thatcher’s victory in 1979. That is, pay disputes became political because the Cabinet and the State were involved.
These, as is well-known, featured prominently during the decade. The unions’ efforts to defend and increase their members salaries, from the late ‘sixties ‘wage drift’ to the need to adjust to inflation, led to countless disputes. Some on the left thought that the resulting “profit squeeze” of the period was a sign of growing working class strength. Other held them responsible for the country’s (relative) decline.
There is a library of literature on this subject. But Anderson could equally have referred to the way in which the authority of British capitalism was challenged from the inside. That is through demands and efforts to make real workers’ power within companies. This movement had an influential and coherent voice. The Institute for Workers’ Control was formed in 1968, with the support of Hugh Scanlon of the Engineering union (AEU) and Jack Jones of the Transport and General Workers’ Union (T & G). It was influential (though never dominant) within the Labour Party and the wider left. The Institute’s conferences debated a broad range of proposals to introduce industrial democracy Above all, management’s right to manage was disputed.
In the wake of Thatcher’s death her supporters have shouted loudly about the role of the unions in the 1970s. They state that organised labour had undue influence over the Wilson and Callaghan Cabinets (1974 – 1979), that they pressured them to shore up unprofitable industries, that they stifled enterprise. It was common to talk about “corporatism”, the way in which efforts were made to draw unions, employers and the state together formally through bodies such as the National Enterprise Board (NEB).
The media has given ample publicity to those who claim that Thatcher freed them from union backed State regulation. That an open market enabled them to succeed. That they took responsibility for their own fate and succeeded. Everybody should be like me – look at my wad ! – is the boast.
Perhaps instead of pointing to the delusions of those who think so highly of their own talents, or to the victims of the same market process, we should consider the forward-looking ideas of the 1970s left. Indeed, with their grass-roots democratic hopes, it might be better to look at this not so distant past, before going further back to the 1945 Labour Government.
An Offensive Movement.
The Institute for Workers’ Control was not a defensive but an offensive movement. It asked the simple question: if democracy is such a good thing for politics, why is it not the rule at work? If individual responsibility is to forced down people’s throats (as is now happening again under ‘welfare reform’), what is wrong with people taking responsibility for the companies that employ them? Marx described the way in which in the market we are ‘free’, the “very Eden of the innate rights of man”? But at the same time, within production, factory, office or shop, there is a sign “No admittance except on business.” (Page 280. Capital Vol. 1. Penguin Edition). In this respect have we not gone beyond the 19th century?
Workers’ Control. Another World is Possible. Ken Coates. (2003) offers valuable material from the Institute for Workers’ Control (which dissolved in the 1980s). Ken Coates article, Democracy and Workers’ Control (published in Towards Socialism. Eds. Perry Anderson, Robin Blackburn. 1965) describes the “antithetical natures of private property and democracy”. He criticised ‘paternalistic Fabianism”, that is the nationalised industries run by civil servants. Read the rest of this entry »
Thatcher and Enoch Powell.
And never satisfies.
Yesterday on Question Time Charles Moore, the author of the soon-to-be published updated biography of Margaret Thatcher, spoke vociferously in defence of her memory and legacy.
He practically foamed with anger at those who ‘disrespected’ her with protests and Death Parties.
Charles Moore combines a boundless admiration for Thatcher with warm feelings towards one of Thatcher’s major influences, Enoch Powell.
Writing of the later Moore said last year,
Powell’s passion was a virtue as well, because political leaders should be able to feel and to dramatise the history that makes a nation what it is.
His commitment to the British nation state, and above all to the Parliament which embodied it, made him pay relentless attention to the visceral issues which lay behind the questions of the day. “Enoch was right”, taxi drivers always used to say 25 years ago.
They meant, right about the dangers of mass immigration. Some of them were racists, but I don’t think most were. They had a pride in the identity of their nation and a fear when they felt it threatened. Powell spoke to these feelings, and although his language was inflammatory, he was right to raise the subject.
If you were around in the 1970s it was not necessary to see the connection between Thatcher and Powell, even after Powell had been forced out of the Conservative Party.
One could simply feel the strong bond.
But if proof were needed Thatcher later said this – on Powell’s views on immigration.
In an interview for Today shortly after her departure from office in 1991, Margaret Thatcher said that Powell had “made a valid argument, if in sometimes regrettable terms.” (Wikipedia)
In more detailed terms the connection is described as follows.
“The former Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, based many of her defining policies along the lines of Enoch Powell’s rhetoric. There are not a great many differences; although Margaret Thatcher did make attempts to curtail immigration, it was not to the extent that Powell had proposed in 1968. Thatcher also intended to greatly reduce the power of the welfare state and national assistance, which Powell had not been so enthusiastic about.”
Andrew Gamble was to call Thatcherism the politics of the “Free Market and the Strong State” .
It was this ideological debt to Powell as well as the New Right that he referred to.
People were forced to be free on the market, and if they didn’t like it they would be stamped on.
Richard Seymour’s Obituary of Thatcher is well worth reading on these links.
When admirers of Thatcher talk of how ‘vicious’ the 1970s left was, and had tasteless and hateful those holding Thatcher death parties are, look at the poem of her hero above.
Its stench is hard to forget.
